Instinct, the invite-only texting agent, binds you to what it agrees

Instinct, from Noah Shinn's Spear Street Technology, is a real, invite-only personal agent you simply text: it books, buys, emails and signs up for things using your accounts, and reports say investors valued it at $10B within weeks. The Verge's reviewer wasn't impressed at first but found it held its own against Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots. The catch is its contract: Terms Section 3 ("Actions") says agreements it enters "shall be binding on you as if entered into directly by you", confirmation steps aren't promised, and the founder's account of a disputed September incident hasn't been independently checked. Fact or hype: Partly fact. A real agent with risky terms that put responsibility for its actions on you. Disclosure: this site uses Grok Bot, a personal agent that competes with Instinct.

Why it mattersFor professionals, the key line is the contract: anything Instinct agrees to or buys counts as your own act, including on behalf of your employer, and you carry the consequences. Keep its access narrow, avoid connecting work or payment accounts you can't afford to have misused, and check its work. We haven't tested it hands-on.

Curated by Sara Simeone as part of our human editorial coverage. The original sources are linked below; curation is distinct from a Hype or Fact? assessment.

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How we knowCompany figures are labelled as their own claims; anything we couldn't verify is labelled as a report or a claim.